Light Peak and InfiniBand/Ethernet Active Optical Cables

USB has electrical power enough to power a scanner, printer, cellphone, camera whereas Light Peak does not have power. Adding copper power rails next to optical fiber in the cable is complicated. Many rumors have been circulating about the adoption by Apple for its PC but nothing formal has been announced yet.

Fresh rumors emerged claiming Apple will introduce new models of the MacBook Pro notebooks equipped with Light Peak interconnects in 2011, perhaps in April.

For transceiver and AOC suppliers, Light Peak is something to watch closely as it has potentially disruptive effect in the commercial datacom interconnect space – especially interconnecting servers to switches. If Light Peak is integrated onto server motherboards at very low cost, it could disrupt the SFP+ and Direct Attach copper transceiver/AOC business as well as impact the 10GBase-T business.

The consumer space is just now ramping up with USB 3.0 and trying to figure out how to make use of 5G. 10G at this time is overkill. However, in the server space 10G is desperately needed to support the new Intel Sandy Bridge processors and new PCI Express 3.0 running at 8G per lane. What happens with 10G Light Peak in the server competing against 10GBase-T in the server will be interesting to see how this plays out.

July 29, 2011

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